usb hard drive showing as unallocated windows xp pro

I have a 1 tb external hard drive. I have been using it and it was working fine. All of a sudden, I tried to access it and the drive letter was not showing up and when I go to device manager, it is showing as unallocated. Luckily, there is nothing on there that is up great importance, but I would like to get it back if possible. Any suggestions?

In my experiences, 99% of USB drive failures are the enclosures themselves.....If it is not under warranty, I would take it out of the enclosure, and see if the drive is still good. Then, instead of having to buy another USB Drive, just need a case for it.....

Run Undelete partition operation on it.
Download trial version of Paragon Backup & Recovery 10 Home: www.drive-backup.com and install it.
Run it - right click on unformatted space and select - Recover Lost partitions. See if it finds anything. When found - restore it.

this happend to me with two different reasons.
1. the cable i was using fromt the drive to the pc would work with some laptops etc but not my toshiba, because it worked on others i was downloading drivers updating xp and all sorts of rubish. i eventually changed the lead and it worked first time every time since. this was a western digital drive.

2. the second fault happend with a usb stick type drive which would not be recognised to read from.
i went into device manager and deleted entry and rescanned for hardware changes then when it seen it and tried to reinstall driver i told it to go to a specifc location, then said i had disc then it listed potentail options one being mass storage device, i chose this and it started working correctly, this was a sony device. good luck

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premiere1Author Commented: 2010-11-22

I have not tried any of the suggestions yet, but thanks for all the suggestions. Here is a fullowup: It does not work on other pc's either. It is a cirago. Tried new cable. Did not help. Another note, by cd/dvd drive quite working about the same time also. Have tried deleting and reinstalling nd keep getting an error. xp has all updates.

you may have a corrupt drive. If you can live without the data and if you can not get at the data then you may have to face up to trying to format the device.
If the device can not even be seen to format it then i would also suggest that you plug it into either a mac or a linux installation and see if it can be seen there?

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premiere1Author Commented: 2010-11-22

I did not try paragon yet, but I had a copy of bootitng, and tried the undelete option, it hang for an hour with no progress, and when I rebooted with bootitng, it showed it there, I rebooted into windows, and it was still unallocated. Is anyone familiar with that software? I powered down because it seemd to be hung without any progress after an hour. I am going to try paragon and see if that does any good.

There is Volume Explorer option on the main interface of this tool. Try to browse the volume with it and see if you can get your data.
Also check for STUBACT.log file in C:\Program Files\Paragon Software\Backup & Recovery\Program folder. Load it here.

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premiere1Author Commented: 2010-11-23

I did delete partition and then undelete partition again. I think I did not wait long enough with bootitng or that would have done it also. It ran most of the night. Thanks for all your help. That software is nice. I may have to pony up and buy it.

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